Guerrilla futurists combat war on terror

The Iraq War is over, Bush has been indicted on charges of high treason, the PATRIOT Act is to be repealed, the economy will be restructured, and public universities are now free.

Film at eleven.

Image via Gawker

I awoke this morning to emails from two New York colleagues about a marvellous and painstakingly planned guerrilla futures intervention today in the Big Apple.

A "special edition" of the New York Times has been produced, to convey, through a detailed set of carefully crafted articles and advertisements, a near-future scenario in which progressives' dreams for the United States have all come true. And 1.2 million copies of it have been distributed for free around the city by a network of volunteers.

Alongside the print edition, a counterpart website has been launched where all the stories are available in full. Both paper and electronic versions are rendered impeccably in the newspaper's signature style, and are dated 4 July 02009 (Independence Day next year).

In scale, this is certainly the most impressive guerrilla futures campaign I've heard of, and I heartily congratulate all those concerned for pulling it off. (It seems -- according to Gothamist, citing Gawker -- that the volunteers were assembled via becausewewantit.org and the effort is being attributed to the Yes Men, guerrilla performance artists supreme, whose astonishing Dow Chemical/Union Carbide interview on BBC World was previously featured here.)

Now, we can expect that some disgruntled newspaper recipients or onlookers may accuse the folks behind this terrific intervention of leading people, shall we say, up the garden path. Such accusations will be missing the point.

Adopting the Times dress is not about hoaxing people; it's a way of calling authority to the vision. As well as being a proprietary media business, its actual status in our media ecology as an authoritative source of news, an idea which belongs to everyone even if the newspaper itself does not, is recruited to lend verisimilitude and weight to the cause.

As Jake Dunagan and I were recently discussing in another context, one of the many devices which makes the Orson Welles classic Citizen Kane so successful is its intermittent cutting to newspaper headlines that help tell the story. (Now, like any novel and effective cinematic trope, this has since become cliche, but this original fictional biopic application, referencing newspaper's authority to help put a frame around plot points in the biography of a larger-than-life newspaper tycoon, makes perfect sense.)

No one addressing more than the most cursory scrap of attention to the actual content of the articles will fail to notice that they are fragments of an "impossible" dream, even if a profoundly noble one: the wholesale transformation of U.S. political culture. Post-election euphoria notwithstanding, the kinds of change described in the "special edition" don't tend to happen overnight, if at all. But the paper quite deliberately calls precisely that into question -- why not?

Similarly, Professor Steve Duncombe recently said in his presentation at HRCFS on Dreampolitik:

These impossible dreams open up a space for democratic participation in the process of imagining the future, which also offers the possibility of escaping the tyranny of the present... for people to imagine, 'why not?', and 'what if?'

This Dream Newspaper is, to use Duncombe's term, an "ethical spectacle" par excellence.

Here's an in-scenario video about the campaign, also from the Times SE site:

Again, kudos to those who orchestrated this highly thoughtful, lovingly detailed, and timely piece of future-jamming. The sceptical futuryst doffs his virtual hat to you all.

Update (19/11/08): On Monday, my own copy of the New York Times Special Edition arrived in the mail.

It brings me so much joy to hold in my hands that it's almost embarrassing.

The difference between hearing about or seeing images of an impossible object, and experiencing it tangibly, is immense.

There's a colour-printed cover; National, International, Business and New York sections; political cartoons; and reports announcing massive legislative and social change around topics ranging from bicycle lanes to corporate criminality. The details in content, graphics, and layout of the 14-page publication are thoroughly splendid -- starting with the slogan "All the News We Hope to Print" on the header. It is, in short, a beautifully wrought artifact of the near-future.

The Yes Men's hallmark "identity correction" strategy is everywhere in evidence: the U.S. government recall notice for all gas-powered cars; advertisements reflecting drastic changes of strategy (or heart?) by companies such as oil giant Exxon Mobil and diamond merchants De Beers; a contrite farewell from pro-invasion columnist Thomas Friedman; and a Corrections section addressing repeated editorial lapses of judgement on the part of the Times itself.

For those unfamiliar with the strategy I mean, the following comes from a book manuscript about the Yes Men's infamous WTO intervention [pdf]...

As many readers will know, "identity theft" has become a major problem on the internet: scoundrels intercept personal information like your date of birth, residence, and credit card numbers, then have all kinds of fun at your expense.

What we have done is the opposite: we have found people and institutions doing horrible things at everyone else's expense, and have assumed their identities to offer correctives. Instead of identity theft, identity correction.

~The Yes Men: The True Story of the End of the World Trade Organization, 02003, p. 6.

Their future newspaper manages to communicate sincere, blue-sky idealism not through earnest moralising or shrill propaganda, but through wit, irony, political satire, and the indisputable thereness of the physical medium whose mantle and idiom it borrows. A preferred future performed, with aplomb. Injected into everyday life, 1.2 million times over, for your consideration. This is one hell of a feat.

Even better, it strikes me as being part of something bigger, of which the Obama campaign and election was a more formal signal. That is, a coming of age, in terms of self-awareness and tactical savvy, of the American left. An answer to the call made in books like Don't Think of an Elephant and Dream.

But this particular effort deserves to be recognised as a landmark, an ingenious, street-level dissemination of one particular vision for American politics. It was a normative intervention more powerful, interesting, and just plain fun (why not, dammit?) than any number of pamphlets or TV advertisements; as outrageously ballsy as calculatedly logical. And one repaid handsomely in the true currency of human communication: attention. "The amount of media coverage the Fake New York Times stunt received was staggering. It spread to news outlets all over the globe like wildfire." (Urban Prankster, 14 November 02008)

It's true that these newspapers have been fetching quite a bit on eBay over the last week, but my copy is safely in the archive. One piece of a laudable future-jamming effort of unprecedented magnitude, which -- and I mean this in the most flattering possible way -- I hope will be outdone, many times over, as soon as possible.

I'm extremely grateful to Steve Duncombe for sending it (our man in NYC, who helped arrange the intervention). Thanks Steve!

Jim Dator catches up on next year's news

Related posts:
> Future news-flash: your vote counts
> Manifesting vision
> Tomorrow's headlines
> Dreampolitik
> Found futures

(Thanks Jason and Victor!)

Dreampolitik

On the political importance of impossible dreams.

This is a video of political activist, theorist and NYU prof Stephen Duncombe (previously mentioned here) presenting recently at the Honolulu Futures Salon. It runs for about half an hour.*

Imagining and planning for the future on a large scale, argues Duncombe, is usually the province of "experts"; architects, urban planners, engineers, and yes, futurists (sometimes). Similarly, the purveyors of future-oriented texts whether utopian (such as Thomas More and Edward Bellamy) or science fiction in genre have been individual authors. The result is that the production of images of the future has traditionally been quite undemocratic. That is, it has been left to a very small group of individuals.

In its most pernicious form, the top-down imposition of a particular, singular vision of the future has meant projects seeking, and sometimes accomplishing, a terrifying lockstep obedience, embodied by autocratic figures like Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and Rumsfeld. However, Duncombe points out that intrinsically "the future is a democratic project -- people make history". And various participatory, public projects have been animated by this more collective, bottom-up way of thinking, such as Constitutional Conventions, Glasgow 2020, and (to add my own example to the list) Hawaii 2000 [pdf]. He notes:

With this model of futurism, the futurist's job changes. They're no longer architects of the future, but instead, organisers and facilitators of situations and experiences that bring people together to imagine the future.

Notwithstanding the explicitly "political" character (in an institutional sense) of these examples, future-oriented initiatives need not be positioned that way in order to tap public concern and imagination. The above quote happens to be practically a word-perfect description of the futurist's role in Superstruct, the world's first massively multiplayer forecasting game, and a cutting edge instance of harnessing collective intelligence. (By the way, the game is live as of last Monday, so if you're interested in these themes and not a registered player yet, you should be!)

Now, Duncombe knows that even if this more democratic, distributed kind of futuring addresses the autocratic problem, serious challenges remain. One of these, which may sound abstract, but plagues even the most practically oriented attempts to envision the future, is "the problem of totality". However much we might like to, we can't simply step outside our social, political, cultural and temporal context to think and communicate about radical change.

It is exceedingly difficult to imagine something you don't know.
...
Not only can we not dream something new, but even if we could, it would be impossible to communicate that. It would literally be insensible; I would be seen to be speaking gibberish.

Thus goes the argument, support for which can readily be found in the way that conceptions of the future, historically, are so clearly a product of their time: consider Bellamy's inescapably Victorian vision in 01888 of the year 02000 [link], or 01950s designs for future cars (especially flying ones) replete with telltale tailfins [i.e.] that instantly date them [e.g.].

Against this backdrop, then, comes Duncombe's central idea, a contrast to Otto von Bismarck's Realpolitik contention that "politics is the art of the possible". Another way to approach politics (in the broad sense that covers perceptions, not just institutions) may be a practice that Duncombe calls Dreampolitik, to invoke the art of the impossible. He cites the work of artists Steve Lambert and Packard Jennings (blogged here earlier) and also the FoundFutures postcard project (see here) as examples of strategically provocative depictions of futures that may appear entirely unlikely, and yet which enable discussion of possibility in a different way.

Duncombe says:

These impossible dreams open up a space for democratic participation in the process of imagining the future, which also offers the possibility of escaping the tyranny of the present... for people to imagine, 'why not?', and 'what if?'

This argument is essentially identical to the distinctive conception of futures practice at the "Manoa School", the most well-known encapsulation of which remains Dator's second law: "Any useful statement about the future should appear to be ridiculous". However, the usefulness of ridiculousness is not universally appreciated by practising futurists. And the fact that Duncombe, a political theorist and activist, has found his own way to much the same conclusion as veteran futurist Dator does not in itself make them both right. But I happen to think that they are, and here's why.

Imagine a spectrum or scale of likelihood, ranging from "impossibility" at one end (probability = 0), to "inevitability" at the other (probability = 1) . Any point on this scale may be associated in our minds with a scenaric proposition. The extremes of this scale, those notions of impossibility and inevitability, are among the most politically potent ideas in existence, because, deployed effectively, they are like the traffic lights of the attentional economy. An idea about the future that is constructed (we could say "tagged") as impossible or outlandish is red-lighted, and those who adhere to it or perhaps even idly entertain it may, it follows, be dismissed as stupid, dangerous or irresponsible. A proposition tagged as inevitable, on the other hand, is accordingly green-lighted for all manner of attention in response.

Of course, the spectrum between these poles is possibility -- a greyscale of maybes. Now, I'm focusing on the extreme cases because they make the point clearer, not because the middle is insignificant. But these extremes, though they appear to be opposites, have one important thing in common: when we believe something is either impossible, or inevitable, we are by definition implicitly accepting that nothing can be done about it. Such conclusions are showstoppers. Inevitable means it's going to happen; and impossible means it's not on the menu. Either way, there's no scope for agency, or responsibility for the occurrence of those things. (There may, I hasten to add, be plenty to discuss about what to do following such a conclusion -- e.g., if some course of action is tagged "impossible", the "possible" alternatives may come under scrutiny; or an "inevitable" disaster may be mitigated, even if you've concluded that it can't be avoided.) But the point I'm making is about the crucial consequences that flow from embracing these extremes. If a tax hike is to your mind "impossible", any argument about it is over before it begins. If war is "inevitable", you might prepare to fight the war, but evidently you'll no longer fight the proposition that war is in our future.

Incidentally, "necessity" is another politically charged tag, substituting normative commitment for probability. That which is "necessary" needs to happen; although it's conceivable, if unacceptable, that things go otherwise.

In any case, clearly our understandings have concrete normative implications. To question ideas about what's possible (a restlessly moving target, if ever there was one) is part of a mode for futures work that encourages people to think for themselves, and for us as political actors to assume as much responsibility as we can for the great mass of possibilities that rightfully belong on the greyscale of probability, where things can be influenced to some degree, and preferred futures may be invented, pursued, and (perhaps) realised.

I'm not convinced that a scenario or artwork needs to be literally (or according to informed consensus, at any rate) "impossible" to be useful, although neither do I think that Duncombe is necessarily advocating that. "The art of the impossible" that he describes deliberately plays with subjective perceptions of impossibility, as a political heuristic, a lever to pry open what Dator has long called (after C. Wright Mills) the "crackpot realism" of the present. In my experience, for the purpose of exploring alternative futures, a good scenario ought to seem ridiculous or even impossible at a first glance, and then become more compelling as you spend time with it. That's a powerful way in which our perceptions may be rewired, and our conceptions of the range of plausible futures rewritten.

It is in my view necessary -- but not, I think, inevitable -- that more futurists develop their appreciation for, and facility with, the art of the impossible.

Related posts:
> The production of necessity
> Dreaming the home of the future
> How future-shock therapy works
> San Francisco's awesome future

* The full version with post-talk discussion can be found via the HRCFS website. Jake Dunagan and I started the Honolulu salon in 02005, with the encouragement of John Smart at the Acceleration Studies Foundation. Since then, we've been delighted to host a variety of interesting forward-looking thinkers, including GBN cofounder Jay Ogilvy, Long Now executive director Alexander Rose, Jamais Cascio of Open the Future and IFTF, as well as Smart himself.

Dreaming the home of the future

versus

A scene from PATH Concept Home video (part 3 of 4: "Flexibility").
Top: a scene from Disney Innoventions video

Following a post here recently about Disney's new Tomorrowland attraction, a different take on the same topic...

A "House of the Future," a concept of what tomorrow holds for cutting-edge living, usually tells us more about the dreamers than the dream.

In the mid-1950s, Disneyland, with the help of Monsanto, cooked up its "House of the Future," nearly all of it made of plastic... This was pretty radical stuff, but it was also a vision of living in the future that was based on extending our reliance on cheap oil into infinity.
...
This summer Disneyland opened a new version of living in the future in its "Tomorrowland"... Like the Monsanto house of 50 years ago, this latest Dream Home is a big ad.
...
All of our old habits cultivated in a gluttonous energy culture are given free rein in Disney's version of tomorrow. You can't make a move without consuming kilowatts. This Dream McMansion preserves the suburban model that $4-a-gallon gas has made into a nightmare.

If anything, Disney ought to change the story line: "This is how people in the most resource-consuming nation on Earth dreamed they'd still be living in the future without environmental and economic consequences."

There's another Dream Home out there. It hasn't gotten a fraction of the attention lavished on Disneyland, but it offers a future that we might actually be able to live with. Last year the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development unveiled its "Concept Home."

The ideas behind the home try to come to terms with the energy mess we're in.

~Michael J. Crosbie, "Real House Of The Future Is No Disney Dream", Hartford Courant, 3 August 02008.

Restated in terms of Dator's generic images of the future, we have in these two houses (Disney's and HUD's) a pretty clear contrast between two embodied future scenario types: "continuation" (business-as-usual) and "discipline" (self-restraint on resources).

I'm very sympathetic to the point that Crosbie, an architect and professor, is making: HUD's so-called PATH (Partnership for Advancing Housing Technology) Concept Home is practicable, sustainable, and ethical in a variety of ways that Disney's immersive advertisement for energy decadence isn't, and yet comparatively, the former seems to have been all but ignored.

What gives? That's a question the Crosbie piece doesn't discuss at all; in other words, why this unjust situation might be so.

Well, I'm currently reading NYU media prof (and recent HRCFS futures salon guest) Stephen Duncombe's book Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy. And I think it might help us out here (pp. 8-9):

Spectacle is our way of making sense of the world. Truth and power belong to those who tell the better story.
...
If we want our ideas to lead and not trail the politics of this country, then we need to learn how to think and communicate in today's spectacular vernacular.

With that in mind, check out their respective websites (PATH; Disney) and take another quick look at the photos above. I know, I know, it's not at all a fair comparison -- the multimillion dollar dream machine going up against the the do-gooding public-private partnership -- but humour me. Words don't cost much to write; let's see how they look side by side. Here are the opening lines of the two projects' press releases:

HUD Unveils America's First Efficient, Sustainable, Affordable Concept Home

PATH Concept Home represents the New American Dream during National Homeownership Month

[6 June 02007]

Omaha, NE -- The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development today announced the completion of America's first PATH Concept Home featuring more than 60 efficient, sustainable and flexible products and systems all in one affordable home.

HUD Assistant Secretary Darlene F. Williams speaks prior to the Concept Home ribbon cutting on June 6. She is joined (left to right) by Omaha Mayor Mike Fahey, builder Fernando Pages, and HUD Regional Director Macie Houston."With the PATH Concept Home, HUD has created a blueprint for the future of the American Dream by using innovative housing technologies that support our goals of sustainability, efficiency and flexibility in an affordable home," HUD Assistant Secretary Darlene F. Williams told the gathering of community and industry leaders. "June is National Homeownership Month and we are excited to showcase a home that is affordable to purchase, maintain and renovate as families and their needs change over time."

[link]

versus

IT'S THE HOME OF YOUR DREAMS! INNOVENTIONS DREAM HOME INVITES GUESTS TO EXPERIENCE THE FUTURE TODAY

New Tomorrowland Attraction at Disneyland Resort Combines State-of-the-Art Technology with the Latest in Disneyland Immersive Storytelling

ANAHEIM, Calif. - June 16, 2008 - Imagine a home so perfectly attuned to the needs of a family that it can anticipate and fulfill them, virtually without anyone lifting a finger. Now imagine that the home offers family members high-tech connectivity, not just with one another but with people, entertainment and information in the world at large.

Guests at Disneyland can soon do more than imagine it. Beginning June 17, the Innoventions Dream Home in Tomorrowland is bringing that world to life as a limited number of guests have the opportunity to preview the home.

[link]

So here's the Pepsi challenge, kids. Who's telling the better story?

Hint: Dream Home (Disney) vs Concept Home (HUD).

I feel a little bad saying it, but in this light, the attentional gulf separating the pair isn't all that surprising.

And lest I should be accused of overlooking or devaluing it, there is indeed far more substance, thought, rigour and ethical engagement in evidence in the concept home's presentation than in Tomorrowland's pile of eye-candy -- but that's just my point. In America today, the nutritious meal that doesn't taste good doesn't get eaten. (Yeah, thought that was a pretty neat analogy too.)

So, *brow furrowing, eyes narrowing*, doesn't Duncombe's dream prescription mean selling out progressive high-ground to crassly commercial ways of operating? In fact he's intensely aware of that risk, and notes (pp. 16-17):

Between arrogant rejection and populist acceptance of commercial culture lies a third approach: appropriating, co-opting, and, most important, transforming the techniques of spectacular capitalism into tools for social change.
...
The challenge for progressives is to create ethical spectacles.

If Crosbie is right, and the "House of the Future" tells us more about the dreamers than the dream, one of the things it may be telling us about the sustainability-oriented dreamers is that we're still learning to dream aloud in a compelling way. It seems to me that creating ethical spectacles that recast the -- perhaps necessary -- austerities of a "discipline" future as more "dream" than mere "concept" is where it's at, for building futures that are both practically inhabitable and aesthetically appealing.

That's where I'd prefer to live, anyway.

Related posts:
> Today at Tomorrowland: yesterday's future
> Sponsors of Utopia
> If they buy in, are you selling out?

San Francisco's awesome future

All images in this post via Steve Lambert's website | Link for this photo

A public art project entitled "Wish You Were Here! Postcards From Our Awesome Future" has just concluded in the streets of San Francisco (press release):

The San Francisco Arts Commission's Art on Market Street Program's new Kiosk Poster Series by artists Packard Jennings and Steve Lambert features visions of a future San Francisco, including transportation improvements and other imaginative urban developments.
[...]
Artists Packard Jennings and Steve Lambert asked Bay Area architects, city planners and transportation engineers, "What would you do if you didn’t have to worry about budgets, bureaucracy, politics, or physics?" Ideas from these conversations were then merged, developed and perhaps mildly exaggerated by the artists to create six imaginative poster designs for exhibition in the Market Street kiosks.

The six original poster designs include a Muni of tomorrow,

expansive new wildlife refuge areas throughout San Francisco,

suggestions for commuter friendly activities on dedicated BART cars,

a farm in the Candlestick stadium,

a new individual commuter line (literally) from the top of the Ferry Building in San Francisco to Oakland,

and suggestions for removing or moving unpopular buildings following a public vote.

Packard Jennings and Steve Lambert, both together and individually, often collaborate with a wide range of people for their projects, which typically engage directly with audiences in public settings about social and political issues.

The artwork combines the schematic line-drawing look of airline safety cards with a warm, whimsical quality which recalls the Victorian-era images of the future associated with writers like Jules Verne. It's really nice to see the too-often sombre, expert-oriented discourse of planners and architects invite engagement with the popular imagination in this way.

It's interesting to compare this project to the Red Cross earthquake awareness campaign blogged here last May. To find such radically different forward views -- shattering vs upbeat -- appearing in different public art projects within the same city begs the question how people reconcile images of the future that are so dramatically at odds with each other... especially at a subconscious level, since few of us are trained to pay specific attention to the competing elements of the futures imaginary.

This is a question to address in more depth as we go along, but I want to mark that as being, in my view, among the primary ongoing tasks of academic futures discourse in general, and this blog in particular.

There remains an open invitation to all readers of t.s.f. who encounter manifestations of scenarios, or images of the future, in any medium, to submit them for inclusion in the evolving gallery of possibilities curated here. On that note, it was NYU media professor Steve Duncombe who emailed Jake and me about this project, which, he said, "seems to resonate with your FoundFutures work" [link]. Thanks, Steve!